Do you ever worry about who you are sharing sensitive information with on social networks? Path solves this problem.

Instead of approaching social media in the standard open way, Path keeps everything private unless you say otherwise. This means you can use Path either as a private journal of your activities and achievements or as a tight network of your friends and family where you can share the most important moments in your life.

In Path, your profile is called your Path. It shows your different posts you have shared. These posts can be made up of a number of media types, including photo, video, people, places, music, thoughts and the times you wake and go to sleep. You can share any aspect of your life to let your friends know what you’re up to or just to keep a record.

In the main feed of Path, you see the recent activities of your friends. Everything is very minimal with icons depicting most of the information out-with user-created content. Photos are at the heart of Path, being the original base of the application, so are given a large amount of screen space.

The Chooser – as named by Dustin Mierau, co-founder and designer at Path – is an example of brilliant design and engineering in the app. The animation of the button was based on the works of Pixar and the concept of every movement beginning with a backwards motion. This creates ultimate fluidity in the app and makes the experience even more enjoyable.

One thing I have noticed about Path for Android is that it is slightly less fully featured and smooth than its iOS counterpart despite the Path developers aiming to release equal apps. Mierau explained that this is because, for an application such as Path, it is more difficult to develop on the Android platform. Don’t fret however! The developer tools for Ice Cream Sandwich include some animation kits which should dissolve this problem. I would expect to see an Android version matching the quality of the iPhone version to pop up in the coming month.

In an interview, co-founder of Path, Dave Morin, described exactly what it is that sets Path apart from the competition. “We sort of see it as your path through life. To us the real differentiator between Path and everything else is it’s one hundred percent mobile-focused, all of the use-cases are meant to be on-the-go and it’s meant to be contributed to and consumed from a mobile device.”

So, what are you waiting for? Go and download Path for your Android phone, iPhone or iPod Touch now! And have a look at these videos while you’re waiting for it to install…